One Step at a Time

Drawing maps for my booklets makes me want to go out and walk the route again. After nine years it’s time to revise my Walks around Newmillerdam, not just because there will have been a few changes to the footpaths but also because the Friends of Newmillerdam and Wakefield Tree Wardens have been making all kinds of improvements to the country park.

Getting into InDesign

The current version of the booklet was designed on a PC using Serif PagePlus but I’m now on an iMac using InDesign so this is a good opportunity to get familiar the new program. I say ‘new’ but I’ve been designing occasional publications with InDesign for five or six years but at such infrequent intervals that when I come back to it I’ve forgotten how to do some vital everyday task such as printing a booklet. This time I went through the whole process step by step, making a note of every setting – even the settings that are so obvious that I think that I can’t possibly forget them! I printed it out as a step-by-step guide, in booklet form, of course.

Hand-lettered

I changed the title for the walks map, again simply by writing it on paper and pasting it into the existing map in Photoshop.

I’ve got access to the most sophisticated tools for typography with InDesign and my iMac but I’ve never found any kind of lettering that suits my hand-drawn picture maps better than my own wobbly hand-lettering. It’s legible enough and I think that it gives a friendly, and relaxed mood to the map, which I hope is how people will feel when they follow the route.

When it came to adding the caption for the restored arboretum (see map at the beginning of this post), which is now managed by the Wakefield Tree Wardens, I wrote the word in fountain pen on layout paper, scanned it and then pasted it into my existing map in Photoshop. I used the eraser tool to create a white space for the word.